climax. Had he not confessed to himself by a deliberate act that he was the victim of a sinful infirmity? It was an infirmity that made the father childless. Self-pride could bear up no longer, and Coleridge cut off all connection with his home. Better that he should die unknown in a strange country than that he should live to hide his weakness in duplicity, or reveal his miserable sufferings to those whose eyes looked up to him. An accident hastened his departure from Rome, and the uncertain feet of the wanderer turned towards England. "I found myself again in my native country, ill, penniless, and worse than homeless."

He went back to Keswick. There he encountered many anxious looks, and perhaps some expostulations, and he could bear neither the one nor the other. Why had he not written during the whole period of a year ? Had he no thought for wife and children? Nay, why had he gone on to Rome to live for nine or ten months on the earnings of a previous year? Coleridge could find no peace in his home. He was not understood there. What remained to him of proper pride was now as much wounded by the misrepresentation of his wife as formerly by the misrepresentation of his mother and brothers. Mrs. Coleridge was a worthy, practical-minded woman, without much intellectual insight. Perhaps she realized that her husband was a man of large gifts and attainments. More probably she took this knowledge in trust from others, who paid Coleridge obvious homage. In any case such superiority could only have value in her eyes if

A lady who knew Mrs. Coleridge tells me that she was woman, but a rather fidgety body."

a fine

it led to material results. It did not lead to material results, and her wifely pride was humiliated by constant observation of Southey's substantial success. Coleridge, on his part, must leave his home. He was distressed by his wife's misunderstanding, and rebuked by his own. accusing conscience. In the presence of daily evidence of Southey's growing fame he was probably as unhappy in his own way as his wife would be in hers. He had ties to bind him to home. There were four of his children now at Greta Hall, and many a sweet idyll of childhood held the tender-hearted man with hooks of steel; his little Sara plucking plums from trees in their dotage in a worn-out orchard, and her little cousin Edith swinging from a bough of an apple-tree; his little Derwent announcing that he had been made by James Lawson, the Keswick carpenter, out of "the stuff he makes wood of," and that James had "sawed him off," and that "he didn't like it." But Coleridge could not bear either misdirected reproaches, or the sight of the happiness which he had forfeited the right to claim.

In his misery he turned to the friend who was dearest of all men to him-the friend to whom he was dearest. Wordsworth had gone to Coleorton, the seat of their new friend, Sir George Beaumont, a painter, better known as the friend and patron of painters. So Coleridge went down to Coleorton, and was received with a pathetic warmth of sympathy, but even there a new form of suffering awaited him. Wordsworth read the poem now called "The Prelude," and Coleridge listened to it in raptures. But the second sense was one of pain. What had he himself been doing while his friend had accom

plished work like this? Nearly ten years had passed since they rambled together over the Quantock Hills and discussed the new school of poetry which was to vivify common incidents with the light of imagination, and do for the events of daily life what a sudden gleam of moonlight does for a familiar landscape. Since then he haď done little or nothing that was worthy of his great powers. Seven of those ten years had been filled with the drudgery of journalism; three had been utterly thrown away. If he had felt himself to be "a little man" beside Wordsworth in those old days, he had not felt that he was therefore any the less in relation to other men. now even this poor unction was gone. He was a little man beside other men, because he was one who of weakness and wantonness had stunted his own faculties. The dark column of hope which in those days was not yet fully turned had turned again, and now all was hopeless darkness. The night after the reading of "The Prelude " Coleridge wrote these lines:

But

What did Wordsworth think of the change in Coleridge? If we turn to the "Stanzas written in my pocket copy of Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence," we may see how that change affected him. The poem has a touch of mystery which was probably introduced as a cover for the hard facts; but there can scarcely be a doubt that Coleridge,

104 LIFE OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.

the man and the poet, Coleridge in his days of hope and of depression, is in the eye of the poet.

"Ah! piteous sight it was to see this man
When he came back to us a withered flower,
Or, like a sinful creature, pale and wan.

Down would he sit; and without strength or power
Look at the common grass from hour to hour."

Mr. Dowden, in his "Life of Shelley," identifies William Calvert, the friend of Coleridge and Shelley, as the second of the two dwellers in Wordsworth's "Castle of Indolence." A baffling difficulty in accepting Mr. Dowden's theory comes to me from my friend Mr. Edwin Jackson (Hawthorns, Keswick), who has discovered that Calvert could not have been the "noticeable man with large grey eyes," (1) because his eyes were not grey, but very dark; (2) because the poem says that the people of the valley wondered what business the noticeable man could have among them, whereas Calvert had the very obvious business of one who came of a family that had for two centuries occupied a position of almost the highest local interest. In the families of the Wordsworths, the Coleridges, and the Calverts, the idea has always had a silent acceptance that Coleridge alone was meant; but that any reader of the sixth and seventh stanzas of Wordsworth's poem could apply them to Coleridge is at least sufficiently surprising. It must be allowed, however, that the description in the fifth stanza is a close parallel to Dorothy Wordsworth's description of Coleridge. I find it no less difficult to accept the theory favoured by Mr. W. Knight and Mr. F. W. H. Myers, that Wordsworth was describing himself in the lines I have quoted. So far as it concerns Coleridge, the question is open to an easy solution. If Wordsworth's poem was written in 1802, exactly as published in 1815, then Coleridge cannot be identified as either of the two men. It was not until 1806 that Coleridge returned to England as a shattered man.

W

CHAPTER IX.

HEN Wordsworth and Coleridge published the

first series of "Lyrical Ballads" at Bristol, there was a lad of fourteen at school in Bath who was fascinated by "The Ancient Mariner." Four years later, when the poets were making their tour in Scotland, the lad was living the life of an outcast in London, having escaped from school and the tyranny of his guardians. He was Thomas De Quincey, son of a merchant who had died when Thomas was a child. From the poverty of his lodgings in Soho he was rescued by his friends, and sent at eighteen as a student to Oxford. This was in 1803, and he remained at the University down. to 1808. In the meantime he had made frequent visits to London, and there he had contracted the friendship of Charles Lamb. His admiration of Coleridge had increased since his schoolboy days, and his interest in the poet was crowned when he learned in 1804 that the author of the "Ancient Mariner" was applying his mind to the student's own pursuits-metaphysics and psychology. Above all things he wished for personal knowledge of so original a genius, and on hearing in 1805 that Coleridge was residing in Malta as